The Callous Mitt Romney: The Full Secret Video of Romney’s Private Fundraiser

On Monday afternoon, Mother Jones Magazine posted a short leaked video online that captured Mitt Romney at an exclusive fundraising event that offered a rare glimpse of his personal views. Speaking at a private fundraising reception earlier this year with millionaire donors in Boca Raton, Florida, Romney described almost half of Americans as “people who pay no income tax” and are “dependent upon government.”

Those voters, he said, would probably support President Obama because they believe they are “victims” who are “entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.” With its unvarnished language, the short video clip seems to undermine what Romney’s aides have tried to argue is an enduring attribute that would appeal to independent voters: a sense that Mr. Romney is, at base, an empathetic and caring man.

Now, Mother Jones has posted the full 49-minute secret video of Romney speaking at that May 17th fundraiser, captured raw and uncut. In addition to his denigrating comments about poor people, Romney’s remarks about a critical area of foreign policy set off another media firestorm, generating headlines around the world. Responding to a question about the “Palestinian problem,” Romney said peace in the Middle East is not possible and a Palestinian state is not feasible, telling his wealthy donors that Palestinians have “no interest whatsoever in establishing peace and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish.”

Romney’s remarks, degrading nearly half of the electorate, sent the Romney campaign, which was already rocked by infighting, into panic mode. The new video confirms the impression of a callous Mitt Romney, who has little idea of how Americans actually live. Further, the additional comments in this full-length secret video solidify previous impressions that Romney can be quite a bully to those who are not a part of his small exclusive group.

Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, which originally was performed at New York City’s Public Theater in 1985, won the 2011 Tony Award for revival of a play. The play is considered to be a literary landmark, contending with the AIDS crisis when few would speak of the disease afflicting gay men, including gays themselves. It remains the longest-running play ever staged at the Public Theater.

In addition, The Tony award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role went to Ellen Barkin, and the award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play went to John Benjamin Hickey, both for their performances in The Normal Heart. Producer Daryl Roth accepted the award, but it was the playwright Larry Kramer, an outspoken gay activist for many years, who received the biggest welcome from the audience. The writer exhorted the gay community to “carry on the fight,” adding that “our day will come.”

The stunning, pulse-pounding ensemble drama tells the groundbreaking story of love, rage and pride as it follows a group of New Yorkers confronting the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. The story of a city in denial, The Normal Heart unfolds like a real-life political thriller, as a tight-knit group of friends refuses to let doctors, politicians and the press bury the truth of an unspoken epidemic behind a wall of silence. A quarter-century after it was written, this unflinching, and totally unforgettable look at the sexual politics of New York City during the AIDS crisis remains one of the theater’s most powerful evenings ever.

President Obama Signs the Landmark Health Reform Bill into Law

Congress gave final approval on Sunday night to historic health reform legislation that will provide medical coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans and remake the nation’s health care system along the lines initially proposed by President Obama. When the decisive 216th vote went up on the electronic tally board in the House chamber, Democrats erupted in cheers and reprised the “Yes, we can!” chant from the Obama presidential campaign.

On Tuesday, President Obama signed into law a landmark health care reform bill, presiding over the biggest shift in U.S. domestic policy since the 1960s and capping a year of vigorous debate. The law will bring near-universal coverage to a wealthy country in which tens of millions of people have been left uninsured.

“We have now just enshrined the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health,” Obama said at a signing ceremony at the White House. President Obama was joined by House and Senate legislators who backed the bill, as well as by ordinary Americans whose health care struggles have touched the president.

Yes We Can! President Obama’s Landmark Health Reform Bill Approved!

Congress gave final approval on Sunday night to historic health reform legislation that will provide medical coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans and remake the nation’s health care system along the lines initially proposed by President Obama. When the decisive 216th vote went up on the electronic tally board in the House chamber, Democrats erupted in cheers and reprised the “Yes, we can!” chant from the Obama presidential campaign.

Things Could Be Worse? Health Care’s Big Lies in Three Morbidly Nasty Minutes!

Can you imagine what if you get sick nowadays, how things could be any worse? No health insurance? “Sorry Bozo,” sneers the clerk at the Emergency Room desk. “Take a Number.” Oh crap, I gots like number 7,426. Oh no, I’m a bloody, bloody mess….and I gots number 7,426. What number are they calling now? Number Three. But even worser things, OMFG unthinkable horrors can happen when you can’t afford Health Insurance. Arms fall off. And ever worser things wither away and drop off a body’s body. It’s just horrible. Yep.

World AIDS Day 2008: To Respect and Protect

Today, December 1st, is the 20th Annual World AIDS Day, a day when individuals and organizations from all around the world come together to bring attention to the global AIDS epidemic. According to UNAIDS estimates, there are now 39.5 million people living with HIV, including 2.3 million children. Around half of all people who become infected with HIV do so before they are 25 years-old, and they are killed by AIDS before they are 35. Around 95% of the people with HIV/AIDS live in developing nations.

However, HIV today is a threat to men, women and children on all continents around the world. Started in 1988, World AIDS Day is not just about raising money, but is also about increasing awareness, fighting prejudice and improving education. World AIDS Day is important in reminding people that HIV has not gone away, and that there are many things still to be done.

D. Patrick Zimmerman, Psy. D.
(Disembedded)

Bruce Springsteen: The Streets of Philadelphia

“Many words may make it sound contrived
But somehow we’re alive
The survivors-Our heads bowed
The survivors-At memorials for other faces in the crowd

Teachers and artists
And Saturday girls
Or twinsets-and-pearls

If life is worth living,
It’s got to be run
As a means of giving,
Not as a race to be won
Many roads will run through many lives
But somehow we’ll arrive.”

Reflections of a Rare Bird: At Death’s Door

Et Cetera: A Bird with an Analytic Bent

It is perhaps worthwhile to revisit and mention an underlying motif of the impressions that some readers might garner from this blog over time. On the one hand, Et Cetera is certainly an eclectic, perhaps even eccentric collection of posts and writings, with topics that cover areas that include: quirky trivia, current events, politics, cultural issues, psychology, minority rights, art (including some sensually artistic works), different types of photography, music and humor. It also presents a rich variety of documentary clips, videos, music videos and photo-galleries. In addition, attentive readers might observe over time that this blog also has an intrinsic intersubjective analytic bent.

Over a year ago, Dr. X posted a delightful review article on his blog, Dr. X’s Free Associations, which described his impressions about my blog, a piece that is thoughtfully written and expresses my own perspective quite well. I do thank him deeply for his kind words, and quote parts of his description for you below:

“Over the past months, I’ve returned to this blog many times to sample the satisfying entries on a range of topics including current affairs, psychology, psychoanalysis, people, cultural issues, politics, art and poetry. Each time I read further in this site, I find more and enjoy more.

The publisher of ECPPC (Et Cetera: Publick and Privat Curiosities) is a psychoanalyst with a strong postmodern, intersubjective bent, which isn’t an analytic model, as much as it is a way of seeing and being. Whether his posts take the form of personal reflections, comments on politics, gripping or entrancing images or poetry, he is, at once, earnest, curious and displays playful-qualities of mind and heart that are indispensable to the analytic endeavor. This playfulness is not only expressed in ideas, but in form, beginning with the playful spelling of the blog’s title.

Rather than look to ECPPC for discursive expositions of the author’s beliefs, the reader is best served by waiting to see what emerges from the intermingling of his or her own thoughts with an accumulation of impressions gathered in this blog. These impressions defy attempts to be nailed down and final, which is a very good thing, in my opinion.

The publisher of ECPPC is a rare bird – which is in my view – the best kind of bird to be.”

At Death’s Door: Maintaining a World of Meaning and Value

Intermittently, I’ve modified my usually eclectic approach in order to devote specific posts to a particular psychological, analytic or relational topic. During the past few months, much has been written about Professor Randy Pausch’s last lecture at Carnegie-Mellon University, his now well-known Final Lecture: Living in the Process of Dying, details about and videos of which can be viewed here and here.

Today, I’d like to bring attention to another contribution that confronts the challenge of attempting to maintain a world of meaning and value against the ever-present backdrop of imminent mortality, an extremely touching article that was written by Irwin Z. Hoffman and presented at the 2000 Annual Meeting of the Rapaport-Klein Group in Washington D.C. At Death’s Door: Therapists and Patients as Agents is a paper that was originally given at the annual Chestnut Lodge Symposium on October 1, 1999 in Rockville, Maryland, and it was written by Dr. Hoffman in honor of David Feinsilver, his sister’s husband and a long-time psychoanalyst at Chestnut Lodge, who died at the age of 59 of cancer.

While Irwin Hoffman’s commentary talks manifestly about therapist-patient relationships, At Death’s Door also speaks more broadly and eloquently to everyone’s relationships and the manners in which we all approach making choices in life and about our own lives. Although only brief sections of the article are presented below, a link to the entire article at The Rapaport-Klein Study Group is given:

Paper presented on June 9, 2000, at the Annual Meeting of the Rapaport-Klein Study Group

Prologue

An earlier version of this paper was originally presented at the annual Chestnut Lodge Symposium on October 1, 1999 in Rockville, Maryland. In February 1999, David Feinsilver, my sister’s husband, and my good colleague and friend, died at the age of 59 of cancer. He had been on the staff at the Lodge for more than 30 years. This all-day conference on therapeutic action was dedicated to his memory. As one who had been close to him, and with whom David had shared common psychoanalytic interests and — increasingly toward the end of his life — common ideas about the analytic process, I was invited to be one of two plenary speakers. Thus, the context of the original presentation was one in which my sister and her grown children were present along with many others who knew the family well. Presenting the paper was itself a highly personal act of “affirmation” in the face of loss and mortality, part of a ritual of memorialization and rededication. The reader is invited to consider the context-dependent meaning of that moment, in which aspects of the content of the paper were paralleled by aspects of the process of presenting it.

Rising to the Occasion

My brother-in-law, David Feinsilver, was a champ when it came to living to the fullest whatever the obstacles. He came to Chicago with my sister and with both of their grown children in April 1997 to attend my younger son’s Bar Mitzvah. That was a brave and generous feat considering the amount of discomfort, pain, and fatigue that David was experiencing from his cancer and chemotherapy treatment. David always pushed himself, though, to try to do whatever was necessary, or more than that, the maximum that was possible. That attitude generated some outstanding writing in David’s last years and months. In one of his last papers, The Therapist as a Person Facing Death: The Hardest of External Realities and Therapeutic Action (Feinsilver, 1998), David defined the term “mentsch” in a manner that could so readily apply to him: “a person who confronts, clarifies, and overcomes what frustrates him, internally and externally, and then acts morally, ethically, and with compassion, to do what the situation calls for; in essence a person who rises to the occasion on difficult occasions to do ‘the right thing‘” (fn. p. 1148). So, considered in a secular way, there was David at the Bar Mitzvah rising to the occasion, despite his illness, to celebrate my son’s emergence in the community as a responsible agent, as a contributor to the uniquely human project of socially constructing and maintaining a world of meaning and value against the backdrop of mortality and of a brutally indifferent universe.

Acts of Will and Determination

We are so used to thinking of anything our patients do as psychically determined we end up contradicting ourselves whenever we treat them as free, responsible, and not fully predictable agents. Although the ideology of psychic determinism presumably covers all human functioning, including that of the analyst, Freud’s paradigmatic “person” was decidedly the patient not the analyst. Thus, the patient’s freedom was precluded by the combination of forces acting upon his ego. But the analyst’s freedom was also virtually eliminated by the requirement that he or she follow whatever scientific method was necessary to explore and discover the truth about the patient’s unconscious uninfluenced by the analyst. As Otto Rank (1945) wrote: “In Freud’s analysis, the will apparently plays no particular part, either on the side of the patient or on the side of the analyst” (p. 11).

Without attempting to solve the conundrum of free will that philosophers have been struggling with for millennia, please allow me this one philosophical reflection. Determinism is no more satisfying intellectually than is free will since it merely begs the question of origins. If what I am writing right now is determined entirely by causes other than my will, what were the causes of those causes, and so on ad infinitum? There is nothing any more or less unfathomable about how a person could be a choosing subject or agent than there is about the origin of the universe. Moreover, ultimately, we act as though we believe people are responsible agents and to act differently would create a very different world. Then the question would be whether we want to “choose” to create that world in which human beings are not held responsible for their actions. I think most of us would be averse to creating much less living in such an environment.”

Again, interested readers are highly encouraged to access the full version of Irwin Z. Hoffman’s important and stimulating paper, At Death’s Door: Therapists and Patients as Agents, from the collected papers of The Rapaport-Klein Group here.